Crescendo (steven Hawk & Inola Walela, #3)

The second book in the Hush, Hush saga opens with a prologue set fourteen months before the main events. Harrison Grey, Nora's father, receives a late-night call from his old college roommate and drives to Portland. The friend, who has not aged and bears a brand mark shaped like a clenched fist on his throat, warns that once "she" turns sixteen, a dangerous figure will come for her. Before Harrison can leave, gunshots erupt. He runs back to find a dark-haired young man interrogating his friend at gunpoint. Harrison fires, but the bullets have no effect. The young man shoots Harrison and drags his body into an alley. Harrison dies unable to warn Nora.

It is late June in Coldwater, Maine. Sixteen-year-old Nora Grey watches fireworks at Delphic Beach with her boyfriend Patch, a former fallen angel who saved her life two months earlier, earned back his wings, and became her guardian angel. Patch's closest friend, Rixon, a fallen angel, joins them. While in line for food, Nora encounters Marcie Millar, her school nemesis, who cruelly reminds her that her father is dead. That night, Nora and Patch exchange tokens: He gives her his silver archangel chain, and she gives him her father's copper ring. She tells Patch she loves him, but he claims to hear something in the woods and drives off without responding.

Nora begins summer school chemistry and is paired with Marcie, who reveals Patch was standing in her driveway the previous night. When Nora confronts Patch, he insists the visit was business but will not explain. He speaks directly to Nora's thoughts and reveals that the archangels, the highest-ranking angels, have placed him on probation: If they suspect he loves Nora, they will banish him to hell. Overwhelmed, Nora tells Patch she wants out and pushes him away.

That evening, Nora's mother, Blythe, hosts dinner with the Parnells, old family friends. Their son Scott Parnell is tall and rough-edged, and Nora suspects he may be Nephilim, half-human descendants of fallen angels, after overhearing what sounds like telepathic speech. Nora has a vivid dream set in historical England in which a nobleman named Barnabas Underwood is attacked by a fallen angel. When the nobleman's hood falls back, Nora sees the face of Hank Millar, Marcie's father.

Angry at Patch, Nora accepts Scott's invitation to the Z, a pool hall. Patch warns her that Scott is a first-generation Nephil, a direct descendant of a fallen angel, who belongs to a Nephilim blood society. The society aims to free Nephilim from bondage during Cheshvan, a two-week period when fallen angels possess Nephilim bodies. If it succeeds, fallen angels will possess humans instead. A brawl erupts. Patch evacuates Nora but goes back for Marcie, telling Nora he is no longer her guardian angel since she rejected him.

Nora begins seeing apparitions of her dead father. She spots Marcie climbing into Patch's Jeep, and a fight between Nora, her best friend Vee Sky, and Marcie leaves Nora with a black eye. At a bakery, a stranger delivers an envelope containing an iron ring stamped with a clenched fist and a note: "THIS RING BELONGS TO THE BLACK HAND. HE KILLED YOUR DAD." Nora cannot identify the Black Hand.

Patch enters Nora's dream, and they kiss, but Nora accidentally touches the scars on his back where his wings connect, pulling her into his memory: She watches Marcie kiss Patch, and he does not pull away. Nora wakes devastated. At Scott's apartment party, she kisses Scott to make Patch jealous. In the scuffle that follows, she spots a brand on Scott's chest identical to the ring's stamp. Scott confesses that a masked figure called the Black Hand stalked him, revealed his Nephilim heritage, and branded him.

Nora opens an apology card from Patch, laced with a sedative, and wakes trapped in the library; she escapes and is chased by an SUV. At Marcie's party, Nora searches the bedroom and finds evidence linking Patch and Marcie. Patch rescues Nora and offers to go rogue, to abandon the archangels and accept damnation. He tells her that being with her is the one thing he did right. Nora realizes the only way to protect him is to let him go.

At Old Orchard Beach, Rixon reveals that the Black Hand is Patch's old nickname from their days as mercenaries. Nora goes to what Rixon identifies as Patch's apartment and finds six of the Black Hand's rings and a ticking bomb; she barely escapes the explosion. She confronts Patch, who does not deny the nickname. Nora accuses him of killing her father and orders him out.

In a dream visit, Patch explains that the archangels reassigned him to guard Marcie because her father, Hank Millar, is a purebred Nephil whose daughter faces sacrifice. He also reveals that the blood society has put a contract on whoever killed Chauncey Langeais, the Nephil who founded the society and whom Nora killed two months earlier. When Nora returns Marcie's stolen diary, Marcie reveals that Nora's mother has been having an affair with Hank Millar, and Hank may be Nora's biological father.

At Delphic amusement park during the Summer Solstice, Scott, who previously broke into Nora's farmhouse to reclaim a ring she found and was arrested for it, escapes jail and confronts Nora. Rixon shoots Scott and leads Nora into tunnels beneath the fun house. There, Nora's father's ghost appears one final time and tells her to touch Rixon's scars because the truth is there.

Nora touches Rixon's scars and enters his memory of her father's murder. The killer in Patch's ball cap is too lanky to be Patch. It is Rixon. Confronted, Rixon reveals that Harrison Grey was not Nora's biological father. Her real father is Hank Millar, originally named Barnabas, a purebred Nephil. Hank is Rixon's vassal, the Nephilim whose body Rixon can possess during Cheshvan. Hank hid Nora with Harrison and Blythe to protect her from Rixon, who needs to sacrifice a female descendant of his vassal to gain a human body. Rixon confesses to orchestrating everything: drugging the card, framing Patch, feeding Nora the wrong address, planting the bomb, and impersonating her father's ghost.

In the mechanical room, Nora finds Scott wounded but alive. He confesses that the Black Hand ordered him to protect Harrison Grey the night of the murder, but Scott refused and has carried the guilt since. Rixon enters, shoots Scott again, and shoots Nora in the arm. As she loses consciousness, Patch steps into the doorway.

Nora wakes in an ambulance. Patch explains he had long suspected Rixon but could not believe his friend would betray him. He tried to warn Nora through her dreams, but she kept blocking him. He went rogue to save her and sent Rixon to hell. Patch returns her father's ring, now engraved with NORA and JEV, his real name, and gives her a key to his true home at Delphic. Nora calls her mother and acknowledges the truth about Hank Millar. Scott leaves a voicemail saying he bought Nora the Volkswagen she wanted as an apology.

As Nora and Patch share a quiet moment, Nephilim surround them. Hank Millar steps from the shadows, introduces himself as the real Black Hand, and asks whether Nora killed his friend Chauncey Langeais, leaving the story on a cliffhanger.